1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to virtual machines in a distributed cloud computing environment, and more specifically relates to a host swap hypervisor running on a physical host computer with a primary hypervisor to provide a high availability hypervisor for the virtual machines on the physical host computer during a failure of the primary hypervisor for the virtual machines.
2. Background Art
Cloud computing is a common expression for distributed computing over a network and can also be used with reference to network-based services such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is a cloud based service that provides physical processing resources to run virtual machines (VM) as a guest for different customers. The virtual machine may host a user application or a server. As used herein, a hypervisor is a partitions manager that manages the virtualization of a server's resources, meaning it manages an environment where multiple virtual machines are hosted on a single physical computer system. The hypervisor is responsible for allocating and managing resources (e.g. memory and processor) across multiple virtual machines running on a given server or system.
High availability means availability despite planned outages for upgrades or unplanned outages caused by hardware or software failures. When a hypervisor on a physical host fails it is desirable for the virtual machines executing on the host to continue uninterrupted.